Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Brightening a photo while keeping sharp eyes

I'm trying to get better at photoshop and am learning so much all at once that I don't want to lose it, so I'm going to start posting sort of my own personal textbook of how I acheived certain effects in my photos.
This is the bright eyes/ Screen effect.

Here's the before:

There's just NOTHING special about it (except the adorable model, of course). Here's what I did:

1) Under layers (bottom right box) drag and duplicate layer.
2) From normal, switch it to screen.
3) Repeat this two or three more times.
4) drag and duplicate one more time and make it an overlay. This really brings out the contrast I love.
5) next, to act like eyeliner, I sprayed a boarder of black around edge.
6) merge visible layers, save.

1 comment:

There's this amazing feature, called "masks". Which lets you edit only part of a layer. So when you add a new layer, you can add a mask (hover over some of the options at the bottom of the layers pallet, it'll look like a circle in a square). When you create the mask, it'll be white, and to erase the part of that layer you don't want (say, around his eyes to keep them sharp), you just take a black paintbrush to that area. It's also great if you only want to edit a certain part, you can "invert" the mask, and use a white brush to edit the part you want... Would've saved a few steps in your editing process. :-)